Monday, July 11, 2011

When You Least Expect It: Jack's Story

I met Jack eight months ago. He didn't give me the time of day. He's the football star, the ladies man, and way too cool for Young Life. I became friends with many of his friends, but the most I could ever expect from Jack was the typical head nod. Not even a "What's up?." Just the head nod.

I prayed for him, went to his games, sat at his lunch table, and still no response. I was praying for a miracle, that somehow, even though he'd never been to club, he would end up on our camp bus. The day came for us to leave, and I thought God had let me down, no Jack.

But something happened. God threw me a curve ball I never saw coming.

A week later our bus pulled in to the Chick-fil-a parking lot at 4am on Sunday morning. It had been a long week of Young Life camp. We all were exhausted. I managed to sleep until 4pm, showered, and then got right on my most urgent task: posting the 272 pics I'd taken at camp up on Facebook. By the time I'd uploaded them all, tagged them, and attempted to write some humorous captions, it was close to 8pm. Was it really worth 4 hours of my time? You betcha.

Thanks to some Facebook privacy advice from tech savvy friends, I was aware that only my current Facebook friends would be able to see my camp pics, so I decided that I would change the controls for this one particular album. I enabled "friends of friends" to be able to see these camp photos because I wanted other kids at the high school who I wasn't fb buddies with to see pics of their friends having the best week of their lives.

The next day we were having our first All-City Campaigners of the summer. I was expecting to see a crowd of kids still on the "camp high" and a few other club kids who weren't able to make the trip. That's when Jack walked in the back door. Although I was excited inside, I played it cool and gave him a head nod from across the room. I slowly made my way over and welcomed him, discovering he came with a few of the girls who had gone with us to camp.

After Campaigners I went with Jack and some of his friends to get milkshakes. While talking, he slipped into the conversation that he'd seen some camp pics on facebook and that "it looked pretty chill," which translated from high school terminology simply means "man, i wish i would have gone!"